Maarten Gerritszoon Vries

author

Maarten Gerritszoon Vries

A Dutch explorer and cartographer of the 1600s, he is remembered for a voyage that brought some of the first Western European written accounts of Hokkaido, Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands, and the Sea of Okhotsk. His travels helped expand European knowledge of the far northeast of Asia.

1 Audiobook

Reize van Maarten Gerritsz. Vries in 1643 naar het Noorden en Oosten van Japan

Reize van Maarten Gerritsz. Vries in 1643 naar het Noorden en Oosten van Japan

by Cornelis Janszoon Coen, Philipp Franz von Siebold, Maarten Gerritszoon Vries

About the author

Born in Harlingen in the Netherlands in 1589, Maarten Gerritszoon Vries was a Dutch cartographer and seafarer during the great age of maritime exploration. He is best known for a 1643 expedition in service of the Dutch East India Company, when he sailed into waters north of Japan that were still little known to Europeans.

Accounts of that voyage describe visits to Ezo (now Hokkaido), Sakhalin, and the Kuril Islands, making him the first Western European known to leave a written record of those regions and of the Sea of Okhotsk. His name also became attached to places on early European maps, reflecting how strongly these journeys shaped geographic knowledge at the time.

Vries died in 1647 at sea near Manila. Though not as famous as some explorers of his era, his work stands as an important link between Dutch navigation, mapmaking, and early European encounters with Northeast Asia.